JEDDAH, 1 June 2007 — THE FOUR witnesses that the Genuine Opposition presented to the media on Wednesday in Maguindanao had a story of Felliniesque grotesqueness that unfortunately does not shock that much anymore. On the day of the election these alleged board of election inspectors were abducted by armed men on May 14 and taken to a banana field in the municipality of Pangalungan in Maguindanao. There they joined around 56 other inspectors and watched as the armed men filled in the empty ballots. Then they were all asked to sign the back of the ballots, to legitimize them. Another witness said that four vehicles had been used to ferry all of the inspectors to that field.
Now, some Muslim leaders in Mindanao are complaining of an alleged anti-Muslim bias on the part of politicians and poll watchers from Luzon, but I find their charge absurd and obscurantist. The sad fact remains that Mindanao has some of the most impoverished Filipinos in the country, thus making it a prime target for efforts to corrupt the election there by the buying of votes and the outright fabrication of election returns as was witnessed by the abducted election inspectors in Maguindanao.
Adel Tamano, the spokesman of the GO, who is himself a Muslim, has denied any anti-Muslim bias and I have reason to believe him. While Mindanao may have been an Arroyo administration bailiwick, the election process there has been so thoroughly corrupted and tainted that I think the Commission on Elections has no other choice but to declare a failure of election in many Mindanao precincts. Whether a re-election should be held in those areas remains to be seen because with such a high level of corruption one wonders if those areas could have reasonably clean elections anytime soon.
But fraud in these elections has not been only committed in Mindanao. This week even the GO admitted that tens of thousands of votes had been added to leading senatorial candidate Loren Legarda’s count, along with several Team Unity senatorial candidates. Nevertheless, my previous prediction of an opposition sweep in the Senate is still holding true more than two weeks after the election: Eight opposition candidates lead the race, along with two independents and two administration candidates.
What is so sad about this whole election mess is that Filipinos have willingly allowed much of this to happen by not insisting on the computerization of the polls. If voters had been able to use electronic voting machines, as they do in India and many other countries, the final results could have been tabulated by computers within 24 hours, and with minimal fraud, instead of this interminable manual counting of votes and handwritten tabulation of the results.
We have already seen the results of increased voter vigilance in this election with the cell phone filming of fraudulent snowpaking of election returns (which has allegedly resulted in the death of the filmer), and the firm resistance of teachers in Mindanao to moving the counting of votes from places deemed “unsafe” because they were attacked, to even unsafer places where shenanigans could be committed away from vigilant eyes.
It is heartening to see that there is still the flame of civic duty in many voters and officials in Mindanao. Unfortunately, they seem to outnumbered by those forces of evil who just want to seize the whole electoral process and guarantee an outcome in their favor. For those people democracy is a waste and they might as well be living in a dictatorship such as Myanmar’s, where elections have not been held since the opposition won in a landslide in 1990, but were denied any chance of assuming their positions.
The Philippines used to be described as one of the most vibrant and free democracies in Asia. Not anymore. The string of tainted elections since democracy was restored, following the People Power revolution in 1986, only prove how far the country has to go before truly clean elections are held once again in a country that has so much potential.
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